Konfiguring KDE2 - page 2

Finding Help in the Right Places

June 2, 2000

By
Dennis E. Powell

A hacker who knows what he's about would at this
point have dived into the Makefiles to see why my little variation on a schema
wasn't getting installed. I'm not such a hacker, but I was prepared to try this
and really break some stuff, but first ....

One of the hardest habits to break when moving to
Linux or another open source OS is the thought process that says that
configurations are stored in mystically compiled and cleverly hidden binary
files, that if it ain't on a menu, you can't order it. But in Linux, virtually
every configuration is in plain text someplace. Yes, all those fancy GUI tools
are simply specialized, glorified text editors. They do prevent a lot of
mistakes, and they do format everything nicely, but their output is
nevertheless plain old ASCII. KDE is no different. It stores individual user
settings in ~/.kde (the hidden kde directory in the user's home
directory), and the possibilities in the /share/apps/ directory of the
main KDE directory (usually /opt/kde). So I took a look.

In /opt/kde/share/apps/konsole, I found
the various schema (schemae?) that are installed when Konsole is. They were
utterly unchanged from their incarnation in the source directory. I copied my
nifty new file to this directory, fired up Konsole, and there, on the menu, it
now appeared. I was so pleased with myself that I made two more, one with
bright green text and one with bright yellow text. Putting them in the proper
directory gave them a place on the options menu, too.

Now. If the purpose of this little story were to
demonstrate that I'm a kewl haxor d00d, anyone with the brains to have switched
from Windows could see that I've fallen waaaay short. Fortunately, that's not
the point.